September 29, 2016

Kudos to ESPN

Not only has ESPN hired a female, Lindsay Czarniak, to anchor their flagship program SportsCenter but she recently went through a pregnancy and the birth of her first child and now is pregnant with her second child. Not only has there been a “no big deal” attitude regarding Ms. Czarniak’s pregnancies but she also hasn’t been made to cover up the fact that she was pregnant. When I was a youngin’, back in the middle of the last century, women were expected to don garb that masked their pregnancies. Certainly they wouldn’t do anything so outlandish as to wear something formfitting that would let everyone know that she had, you know, done what people do to get pregnant.

Ms. Czarniak wears stylish clothes, clearly showing the state of her pregnancy, and which also surely would have probably gotten her shamed and/or arrested in the 1950’s.

Kudos to Ms. Czarniak and kudos to ESPN for integrating women into their programs, and not stylized, Barbie-esque women, but women with opinions and knowledge and the ability to share that.

PS After I wrote this, the ESPN show Around the Horn, a sports roundtable discussion show conducted in the style of a panel game, had women as three of its four panelists (Kate Fagan, Ramona Shelburne, and Jackie MacMullen, a basketball hall of fame sportswriter). This was not a gimmick show, with cute questions surrounding women’s’ participation in professional sports, the questions were of the ordinary type and the interplay between opinion givers vigorous. Just another sign that the times, they are a changin’.